WP5: Data management for facilitation of new flexibility solutions

15.03.2018

WP5 will develop customer-centric data exchange model for flexible market design serving all stakeholders (TSOs, DSOs, suppliers, flexibility providers, ESCOs, etc.) and enabling data exchange across the borders.

Data regarding electricity consumption has never before been as abundantly generated as it is now in the era of Big Data and therefore can be a valuable source of information to balance supply with demand or manage network congestions. While the topic of metering data processing has been addressed and regulated, this is not the case with access and sharing (including across the borders) of end user electricity consumption data. The situation regarding collecting and processing consumption data varies across countries in terms of regulation and across energy providers in terms of advancement in adoption of information technology.

It is a challenge to develop a single homogenous model or a set of rules to fit all. Requirements of network codes and new market design legislative proposal need to be considered when developing data exchange model. In the beginning of the project this task will look into data exchange models developed or in the planning phase globally, not only in energy domain. This involves interaction with partners/stakeholders not included in this consortium (but with the members of advisory group).

A conceptual data exchange model for the pan-European system including functionalities, processes, roles and services will be developed. The model does not imply a single data exchange platform but rather allows for interoperability of different platforms across Europe.

WP5 will focus on System Use Cases that could impact the feasibility of scaling up flexibility services (on an IT perspective), and that will be useful for demonstrations in WP9. System use cases will be applied and tested in the cross-border data exchange demonstrator in WP9. WP9 will analyse the costs and benefits of theoretical application of proposed data exchange solutions in other demonstrators (WP6, WP7, WP8) and of exploiting and scaling these up. The cross-sectoral data management – electricity, gas, heat, water readings, building information, price information, weather, etc. – will be considered whenever possible. The value of combining different data sources will be studied, and the value of having “utility” demand data available in single place will be assessed and quantified.

The work package will also investigate the options for implementing massive data exchanges, with appropriate data storage and data processing as required for extensive use of flexibility services and will propose solutions to enhance existing architectures and develop new data exchange platforms in the energy domain. Some proposed solutions will be demonstrated on cross-border and cross-sector data exchange use cases with WP9. This tasks involves the following:

Identification of technical requirements for the data exchanges based on the use cases from Task 5.2 (e.g. requirements relating to data exchange, storage and processing volume, time constraints, security and privacy) and comparison of existing solutions (such as ENTSO-E’s “OPDE” and national data exchange platforms) regarding the identified requirements;
Elicitation of applicable methodologies and big data frameworks for effective data exchange, data storage and processing of streaming and historical data, and estimation of resources and costs to achieve the identified requirements;
Some massive data analysis tasks important for the success of flexibility services, e.g.: quantifying the resilience of service delivery of technologies and solutions to be trialled in SysFlex– it will be important to characterize the extent to which flexibility service providers actually deliver the response they have contracted to provide; prediction of availabilities and quantities of flexibility services – it will be important for the system operators to know how much flexibility will be available; estimation of missing grid measurements – e.g. due to outages or meter failures; data exchange optimization between DSO and TSO for flexibility benefits calculation;
Implementation and demonstration of some of the above data exchange, data storage and data processing functionalities required for the success of cross-border and cross-sector demonstrations with WP9, adhering to the requirements of volumetry, time, security, privacy.

Another task of WP5 will define data security and privacy guidelines and policies for the data exchanges and integrate them into available tools such as UXP (Unified eXchange Platform, provided by Cybernetica and already in use in cross-domain data exchange solutions in several countries both inside and outside of EU) and KSI (Keyless Signature Infrastructure, provided by Guardtime and already in use for data integrity protection solutions in both public and private sector around the world). Further questions to be tackled are: What are the data privacy requirements for data exchange platform sources? What security technologies are needed for data sharing – public key infrastructure (PKI), authorization, authentication, digital signing, trust sources, cross-border cooperation models, necessary logging techniques as well as data provenance technologies? How can Big Data analytics contribute to proactive detection and countering of intrusions and emergent threats? This task will look at different cyber security methods and standards (IEC 62351, IEC 62443, ISO/IEC 27019) available.

Final task of the work package will review current standards and protocols (EU, US, IEC) that could be applicable for WP5, such as standard data models or protocols. (e.g. CIM61970, CIM61968, CIM62325 series, ENTSO-E, and EFET-EbiX Harmonized Role Model). Data exchange models should be based on IEC TC57/ TC13 standards which are defining core standards like CIM/61850/DLSM-COSEM. These standards have been retained by ENTSO-E to support grid codes. Standards used by SysFlex demonstrators (WP6, WP7, WP8) will be reviewed and this knowledge will be used for the recommendations: possibilities of harmonization and interaction between the identified data requirements and already used data models (e.g. CIM CGMES); considering and investigating standardized interfaces and communication methods and protocols (e.g. REST, ESB, SQL DB). This task will potentially identify that standards evolutions are necessary for flexibility services. In this case, methods on how to update and communicate changes in standards will be studied.